Choreography

• The word choreography literally means "dance-writing" from the Greek words "χορεία" (choreo = dance) and "γραφή" (graphy = writing). It first appeared in the American English dictionary in the 1950s, and "choreographer" was first used as a credit for George Balanchine in the Broadway show On Your Toes in 1936.
• Choreography is
  • the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion, form, or both are specified.
  • the art of making dances, the gathering and organization of movement into order and pattern.
• Dance is the movement of the body in a rhythmic way, usually to music and within a given space, for the purpose of expressing an idea or emotion, releasing energy, or simply taking delight in the movement itself.
• In the Theatre Arts, choreography applies to human movement and form.
• In the Poetics, Aristotle states that dance is rhythmic movement whose purpose is “to represent men’s characters as well as what they do and suffer”. His statement refers to the central role that dance played in classical Greek theatre. In classical Greek theatre, the chorus through its movements reenacted the themes of the drama during lyric interludes.

There are two basic motives of dance.

1. The most basic motive of dance is the expression and communication of emotion.
   • People—and even certain higher animals—often dance as a way of releasing powerful feelings, such as sudden accesses of high spirits, joy, impatience, or anger.
   • These motive forces can be seen not only in the spontaneous skipping, stamping, and jumping movements often performed in moments of intense emotion, but also in the more formalized movements of “set” dances, such as tribal war dances or festive folk dances. Here the dance helps to generate emotions as well as release them.
2. People also dance for the pleasure of experiencing the body and the surrounding environment in new and special ways.
   • Dance often involves movement being taken to an extreme, with, for example, the arms being flung or stretched out, the head lifted back, and the body arched or twisted. Also, it often involves a special effort or stylization, such as high kicks, leaps, or measured walks.
   • Dance movements tend to be organized into a spatial or rhythmic pattern, tracing lines or circles on the ground, following a certain order of steps, or conforming to a pattern of regular accents or stresses.

• The choreographic process may be divided for analytical purposes into three phases:
  1. gathering together the movement material,
  2. developing movements into dance phrases, and
  3. creating the final structure of the work.

1. Gathering the movement material

• The way in which the choreographer accumulates movement material depends on the tradition in which he works. In certain dance forms it may be simply a question of creating variations within a traditional pattern of movements. For example, dancing masters in the Italian courts of the 14th and 15th centuries simply invented variations on existing dances and published them in dance manuals bearing their own names.
• In modern Western forms choreographers have worked less within established traditions, creating instead a vocabulary and style of movement to suit their own personal visions.
• Although each choreographer draws material from diverse sources and often employs contrasting styles, most dance works of a single choreographer show a characteristic style of movement.

2. Developing movements into phrases

• A phrase, loosely speaking, is a series of movements bound together by a physical impulse or line of energy and having a discernible beginning and end.
• Many factors work to make the spectator perceive a series of movements as a phrase.
  • The first is the recognition of some kind of logical connection between the movements that prevents them from appearing arbitrary and isolated.
  • Rhythm is a significant factor, and movements are often clearly linked by a recognizable pattern of accents.
  • A movement’s accent is measured by its force and duration; thus, a hard, sharp movement has a strong accent, while a soft, gradual movement has a weak one. In phrases that have perfectly regular rhythm, the strong and weak accents recur in the same sequence and always over the same duration of time.
• Dance phrases vary both in length and shape.
  • A phrase may begin with a very forceful movement, or maximum output of energy, that gradually comes to a pause, or it may have its climax somewhere in the middle or at the end. Other dance phrases, in contrast, have an even distribution of energy.
  • Long, repetitive, evenly paced phrases produce a hypnotic effect, while a series of short phrases with strong climaxes appears nervous and dramatic.
• Once a phrase has been constructed, it can be built onto in many different ways. The simplest ways are repetition, in which the same phrase is simply repeated, and accumulation, in which the original phrase is repeated with a new phrase added on each time.

3. Creating the final structure

• The third phase of the choreographic process, creating the overall structure of the dance, may be influenced by a variety of considerations, including the purpose of the dance. If the work is to be a narrative piece, the plot will obviously determine the way in which the dance material is to be structured. It may have to follow a strict succession of events, create characters in a particular order, and bring the drama to climax at the proper moments. Similarly, if the dance forms part of a ritual, the material may have to strictly follow sanctioned form and procedure.
• The music determines the structure of a dance work, too—by its length, its arrangement of fast and slow movements, and its treatment of theme.
• A dance’s purpose and its musical score are outside influences on its structure. But structure may also be organic; in other words, an entire dance piece may arise from a continuous development of movement ideas, each movement working off of the movement that came before.
• Finally, the structure of a dance reflects the tradition in which it is created and performed. In a performance of the Indian dance form bharata natyam, sections of dramatic and abstract dance follow one another in strict succession for a period lasting up to four and a half hours, while in the kathakali dance form of southwestern India, a single performance of alternating dance and music may go on for 16 hours.

• A Movement director is involved with actor movement in a variety of production settings that include theatre, film, opera and animation.
• Movement directors usually work closely with the director and the performers, collaborating with the creative team to realise the physical life of a work. They propose a physical language to performers and directors, and devise training methods or teach skills that will help facilitate a specific physical style.
• The movement director may create, or research and pass on, embodied information about etiquette, ethnicities (including proxemics, gestural language, social codes, etc.), a character’s condition (related to medical conditions within their historical context, and factors such as inebriation, pregnancy, etc.) and personal journey (ageing, etc.), as well as specialist movement (e.g. period dances, dexterity in falling, lifts and acrobatics, animal work, cross-gendered performance) or chorus work.
• Although choreography is part of a movement directors’ skill-set, this does not mean that every choreographer is also a movement director.
• There are also important differences between the movement director and the fight director, where although the movement director will engage with the effect of the relevant weapons on posture, movement and emotional state, the fight choreography itself is directed by the specifically qualified fight director.